The third choice, Nagasaki was a port city located about 100 miles from Kokura. That was one of the reasons the Target Committee thought it would be a good option after Hiroshima. The Americans knew all this, but strangely had not targeted the city yet in their conventional bombing campaign. In Kokura, a city of 130,000 people on the island of Kyushu, the Japanese operated one of their biggest ordnance factories, manufacturing among other things chemical weapons. Instead they identified Kokura as the second target after Hiroshima.
The Target Committee appointed by President Harry Truman to decide which Japanese cities would receive the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombings did not place Nagasaki among their top two choices.
